Lady Larkspur Part 10

"Well, remember me to Searles if you write him," I heard Forsythe saying. I clutched his arm as he opened the office door.

"Who are those women?" I demanded.

"You may search me! I see you have a good eye. That girl's rather nice to look at!"

Crowding my way to the open, I blocked the path of orderly, sane citizens awaiting their machines until a policeman pushed me aside.

Alice I saw for a bewildering instant, framed in the window of a big limousine that rolled away up-town.

I had been snubbed! No snub had ever been delivered more deliberately, with a nicer calculation of effect, than that administered to me by Alice Bashford--a girl with whom, until a moment before, I had believed myself on terms of cordial comradeship. She had cut me; Alice who had asked me at the very beginning of our acquaintance to call her by her first name--Alice had cut me without the quiver of a lash.

I walked to the Thackeray and settled myself in a dark corner of the reading-room, thoroughly bruised in spirit. In my resentment I meditated flying to Ohio to join Searles, always my chief resource in trouble.

Affairs at Barton might go to the devil. If Alice and her companion wanted to get rid of me, I would not be sorry to be relieved of the responsibility I had a.s.sumed in trying to protect them. With rising fury I reflected that by the time they had shaken off Montani and got rid of the prisoner in the tool-house they would think better of me.

"Telephone call, sir."

I followed the boy to the booth in a rage that any one should disturb my gloomy reflections.

"Mr. Singleton? Oh! This is Alice speaking----"

I clutched the shelf for support. Not only was it Alice speaking, but in the kindest voice imaginable. My anger pa.s.sed, but my amazement at Alice and all her ways blinded me. If she had suddenly stepped through the wall, my surprise could not have been greater.

"You told me the Thackeray was your usual refuge in town, so I thought I'd try it. Are you very, very cross? I'm sorry, really I am--Bob!"

The "Bob" was added lingeringly, propitiatingly. Huddled in the booth, I doubted my senses--wondering indeed whether Alice hadn't a double--even whether I hadn't dreamed everything that had occurred at Barton.

"I _wanted_ to speak to you ever so much at the theatre, but I couldn't very well without introducing you to Sir Cecil, and I wasn't ready to do that. It might have caused complications."

If anything could have multiplied the existing complications, I was anxious to know what they were; but her voice was so gentle, so wholly amiable, that I restrained an impulse to demand explanations.

"Are you on earth or are you speaking from paradise?" I asked.

"Oh, we're in a very nice house, Constance and I; and we're just about having a little supper. I wish you were here, but that can't be arranged. No; really it can't! We shall be motoring back to Barton to-morrow and hope you can join us. Let us have luncheon and motor up together."

When I suggested that I call for them she laughed gayly.

"That would be telling things! And we mustn't spoil everything when everything is going so beautifully."

Remembering the man I had locked up in the tool-house and the explanations I should have to make sooner or later to the unimaginative Torrence, I wasn't wholly convinced of the general beauty of the prospect.

"Montani was in the theatre," I suggested.

Her laughter rippled merrily over the wire. "Oh, he tried to follow us in a taxi! We had a great time throwing him off in the park. I'm not sure he isn't sitting on the curb right now watching the house ungraciously."

"You have the fan with you; Montani jumped right out of his seat when you opened it in the theatre."

This she received with more laughter; Montani amused her immensely, she said. She wasn't in the least afraid of him. Returning to the matter of the luncheon, she suggested the Tyringham.

"You know, I want very much to see Mr. Bashford's old home and the place all our veteran retainers came from. At one?--yes. Good night!" ...

Alice and Mrs. Farnsworth reached the Tyringham on time to the minute.

As I had spent the morning on a bench in the park, a.n.a.lyzing my problems, I found their good humor a trifle jarring.

"You don't seem a bit glad to see us," Alice complained as she drew off her gloves. "How can any one be anything but happy after seeing that delicious 'c.o.c.k Robin'! It is so deliciously droll."

"I haven't," I remarked with an attempt at severity, "quite your knack of ignoring disagreeable facts. There was Montani right in front of me, jumping like a jack-in-the-box every time you flourished your fan.

There's that fellow we've got locked up at Barton----"

"Just hear the man, Constance!" she interrupted with her adorable laugh.

"We were thinking that he was beginning to see things our way, the only true way, the jolly way, and here he cometh like a melancholy Jaques!

We'll have none of it!"

"We must confess," said Mrs. Farnsworth conciliatingly, "that Mr.

Singleton is pa.s.sing through a severe trial. We precipitated ourselves upon him without warning, and immediately involved him in a mesh of mystery. His imagination must have time to adjust itself."

"Ah, the imagination!" sighed Alice with her wistful smile. "How little patience the world has with anything but the soberest facts! Why should we bother about that lunatic Montani or the gentleman immured in the tool-house? I couldn't introduce you to Sir Cecil without antic.i.p.ating the end of our story; and I want you to keep wondering and wondering about us. It's all so jolly! I love it all! And really you wouldn't spoil it, Bob! It's dreadful to spoil things."

They were spoiling my appet.i.te; I was perfectly aware of that. I had ordered the best luncheon I knew how to compose, and they were doing full justice to it; but I was acting, I knew, like a resentful boy.

"I love you that way," said Alice as I stared vacantly at my plate. "But you really are not making yourself disagreeable to us--really he is not, Constance!"

Mrs. Farnsworth affirmed this. I knew that I was merely being rude, and the consciousness of this was not uplifting. At the luncheon hour the influx of shoppers gives the Tyringham a cheery tone, and all about us were people apparently conversing sanely and happily. The appearance of Uncle Bash's ghost in the familiar dining-room would have been a welcome diversion. I was speculating as to just what he would say about his widow and the whole mess at Barton when Mrs. Farnsworth addressed me pleadingly.

"If you knew that we want you to play with us only a few days longer--three days, shall we say, Alice?--if you knew that then we'll untangle everything, wouldn't you be nice--very nice?"

In spite of myself I couldn't resist this appeal. I was more and more impressed by the fineness, the charm of Mrs. Farnsworth. When she dropped the make-believe foolishness in which she indulged quite as amusingly as Alice, she appeared to be a very sensible person. The humor danced in her eyes now, but her glance was more than an appeal; it was a command.

"If you knew that our troubles are not at all the troubles you're thinking about, but very different----"

"Please pardon me!" I muttered humbly, and wished that Alice were not so bewitching in a sailor hat. It may have been the hat or only Mrs.

Farnsworth's pleading tone that brought me to a friendlier att.i.tude toward the universe and its visible inhabitants. The crowd thinned out, but we lingered, talking of all manner of things.

"We must come in again very soon," said Alice. "And next time we shan't run away, which was very naughty. I suppose when you begin a story you just have to keep it going or it will die on your hands. That's the way with our story, you know. Of course it's unkind to mystify you: but you are in the story just as we are."

My mystification was certainly deep enough without this suggestion that I was a mere character in a tale whose awkward beginning aroused only the gravest apprehensions as to the conclusion. She looked at her watch and continued:

"I'm so absurd--really I am, in ever so many ways, that no one would ever put me in a book. Every one would say no such person ever existed!

It's incredible! And so I have to pretend I'm in a story all the time.

It's the only way I can keep happy. And so many people are in my story now, not only Montani and the poor fellow locked up at Barton--oh, what if he should escape! Constance, it would be splendid if he should escape!"

"I don't think it would be splendid if he escaped!" I exclaimed, sitting up very straight at the bare thought of such a calamity. "He would either kill me or sue me for damages."

"Oh, that wouldn't fit into the story at all! Murder and damages are so frightfully sordid and generally disagreeable. We must have nothing like that in our story."

"You didn't finish your enumeration of characters," I suggested. "Is my part an important one or am I only a lay figure?"

"My dear boy," cried Mrs. Farnsworth, "you are the hero! You have been the hero from the hour the story began. If you should desert us now, whatever should we do!"

"If I'm the hero," I replied in her own key, "I shall begin making love to Alice at once."